The initiative, which was launched in August, faces a significant hurdle: Even though a growing number of women are highly educated and qualified to do so, there are still fewer women than men launching businesses. What’s more, programs that target women, as opposed to the entrepreneurial community in general, can often feed dated gender stereotypes, experts say.

Board members at Evolve Women hope to do something different.

The program was co-founded by independent health care consultant Connie McGee and Linda Rebrovick, the CEO of Nashville-based market research firm Consensus Point.

To date, Evolve Women has hosted workshops to help businesswomen solidify business plans and practice pitching to investors. When Evolve Women launched, 200 people signed up and another 200 were on the waiting list, McGee said.

“You can tell that women are desperate for these types of programs,” said Dee Anna Smith, Evolve Women board member and CEO of Nashville’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute. That’s frustrating, in a way. “I think that you want to say that job stereotypes are not there anymore, but they just are,” Smith said.

In fact, according to a 2012 report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, “in nearly every economy, there are fewer female than male entrepreneurs, and they appear to show reluctance to scale their businesses or to enter new and less tested markets.”

That gap doesn’t necessarily have to do with a discrepancy in qualification. “Despite high education levels among women entrepreneurs, and higher levels than men, women in Europe and the U.S. are much less likely to believe they have the capabilities for entrepreneurship compared to men in their economies and women in other regions,” the report said.

Nashville, for one, is a growing entrepreneurial community.

This month, Forbes named the city fifth on its “U.S. Regions to Watch in 2014” list, thanks to, among other things, its predicted rate of job growth. “I’m so bullish on Nashville,” Smith said. “I love the energy and the feeling of entrepreneurship in the city — you can feel the electricity, right?”

'Societal baggage'

Perhaps it’s no surprise, but the entrepreneurial energy has, so far, been male-dominated. Launch TN, a state-funded program designed to boost entrepreneurship in Tennessee, said in its 2012 annual report that 16 companies received money from its INCITE program. Of the 16, one of those is run by a woman: Consensus Point, Evolve Women co-founder Reb­rovick’s company.

The problem is not necessarily a lack of general opportunity, but that general opportunities might not be enough to attract female entrepreneurial talent. “Even if the best of intentions are there to make resources universally available, there’s still an awful lot of societal baggage to unpack,” said Kate O’Neill, founder and CEO of Nashville-based digital marketing consulting firm [meta]marketer.

Part of that societal baggage is just the status quo. There is a very real, informal business community — think “old boys’ club” or deals made on golf courses — said Susan Huggins, CEO of CABLE, a Tennessee-based professional organization designed to promote opportunities for women. Huggins said that business in Nashville, in particular, is relationship-based. She says that powerful people in the city are also members of volunteer organizations such as the Rotary Club.

“When you’re out there building a Habitat (for Humanity) house, you’re a woman right next to a guy wielding a hammer and talking about family and all the things you can talk about in that environment. That’s how those relationships are built,” she said.

Focus on 'main deal'

Beyond building relationships in traditionally male-dominated spaces, finding good programs for women in business can be challenging. Several Evolve Women board members recalled eye-roll-inducing, female-targeted networking events that will focus on diet, say, or tips on how to accessorize.

“I don’t think the discussions about managing your emotions or child care or anything like that are out of bounds,” O’Neill said. “I just think that those topics need to be handled as the outliers as opposed to the main deal.”

The main deal, she said, should be business fundamentals, including the investor pitch and business plan workshops that Evolve Women has hosted. Essentially, it’s content that would benefit either gender. But because there has been a gender imbalance in the business world for so long, providing a women-only space for discussion and education about entrepreneurship is, in and of itself, powerful.

Evolve Women aims to make that space. After all, Nashville can hardly hope to stay on magazines’ cities-to-watch lists if the C-Suites generated here don’t accurately represent the qualified population, about half of which happens to be female.